though I have a sneaking suspicion Jobriq is about to overtake me, I wanted to post my new peak of 1955 just to be in the 1950 club!

Hide(Move your mouse to the hide area to reveal the content)Show HideHide Hide

I know Harsha's primary interest was dealing with Tornadus Hurricane spam without Jirachi and Heatran, but can we just talk about freaking Genesect? I am finding him nigh impossible to deal with, largely because of how unpredictable it is! I LOVE fighting scarf sets, but in the past 5 battles only one has been scarf. One was rocking lefties, one had a CB, and two were expert belt (I assume). I just cant make accurate switches against these things, they are tearing my stall team apart. May have to insert a Volcarona

Won OST Predictions

Just poking here to give my props to ganj4lf for utilizing a unique non-weather, non-Deoxys-D team to complete this challenge! Memento Uxie is pretty ingenious!

I've actually been running a similar set with Mew. The big advantage of Mew is its access to Taunt, and with its base 100 Spe it can even stop Deoxys-D from setting up hazards. Fire Blast also hits wayy harder than HP Fire, so I don't need to resort to giving it Fire Gem. I went with Tbolt over Psychic to hurt Starmie, though. Here's the set:

Thank you Pocket! You're right, Mew is an awesome idea and it's probably better than Uxie, Memento is quite hard to use with an average speed and many powerful threats around, Taunt is invaluable to avoid being set-up bait and Mew just hits way harder than Uxie. I'll give it a try soon, I'm quite busy right now. I may start a new alt, since I'm stucked into the 1870-1880 range and getting mostly +1s...

Won OST Predictions

Ok, well I peaked 1941 and then some stupid crap happened and I dropped, lol. That's probably it for me, I don't really have the motivation to claw back up with the irritating +0s. I have the screenshot, so I will update the OP and thanks for this awesome challenge Harsha :)

Moderator

I just want to issue a general note here. This challenge isn't over yet, but to everyone actually doing this challenge (I stopped but will try and pick it up when im not quite so busy) well fucking done. I know first hand how frustrating those +0 / +1 matchs for winning are, and honestly, well done for those of you that stuck with it and reached those peaks, just... Good Job guys!

What did you think was the biggest challenge when not being allowed to use any of the restricted Pokemon? Was it overcomeable?The biggest challenge was not getting pressured by my opponent. I was sometimes forced not to lead out with deoxys if I saw a hippo + Tyranitar as most TTars are banded on dual-sand teams. there were other situations where I didn't lead out because of Genesect.

How did you feel the challenge tested your metagame skill? Did it make playing much harder, or were youstill able to leaderboard with relative easy?It was pretty much the same. I wouldn't say it was easy beacause I had to make some difficult plays against certain teams. But there were definitely a few free wins when I was laddering.

What is your opinion on how overpowered the Pokemon that you were not allowed to use, but were required to face? Were they too strong to deal with, are there metagame shifts you would consider to correct this? Please don't derail the thread with a constant debate over this point, only reply once you've won! I don't think they were too powerful. The only problem would have probably been scarfed Tornadus, seeing as how I had a scarf latios and mence to outspeed it. But those are rare.

What team style did you use, and how did it fare against the metagame? Were there team styles you couldn't beat? (As an aside, please share your team with an importable! It'll be fun to disect those, and you may even be featured in a Smog article!) I used hyper offense and it did fairly well. I played Lavos's sun team often and the fact that I had two scarfed dragons really helped me out. It was really difficult beating rain stall with tentacruel. Most of the time I used Lucario + Rotom Wash to deal with their defensive cores, but Tentacruel + something like ferrothorn definitely caused me some trouble.

What is your personal opinion on this challenge? I loved it and hope theres more to come. I definitely don't want to use hyper offense again. I love seeing new creative ideas even though I used a fairly standard team. I'm gonna try this challenge again with a completely different team.

The team I used was Deoxys, Scarf Moxie Salamence, Scarf Latios, RestoChesto Rotom-W, SD Lucario, and Sub WilloWisp Gengar,

This will be my final peak for this alt since I've fallen to around 1920 since.

Hide(Move your mouse to the hide area to reveal the content)Show HideHide Hide

I think this challenge should be done again once Zarel comes up with a better ranking system. For me it seemed like it was pretty easy to get up to around 1700 off of the initial bonus pool and higher point awards due to a high deviation. Also since PS matches you with anyone instead of people with a similar rank it's possible (with some luck) to get decently high on the ladder without having to play skilled opponents (although the lower opponents are generally the ones giving out +0 and +1).

Anyway, someone needs to use Meloetta. I've hardly seen any of her on the ladder even though she was released a week or two ago.

Name: Superwii64cube (Im "The Unlucky One" here you can call me either of those names)
Alt name: ITS MAHVEL BABY
Ladder Rank: Getting there

Anyway I'm doing this following that my RMT team has absolutely none of the pokemon banned and uses some very unused pokes like Lilligant and Virizion. I really wanna use this team because I enjoy it and I like using the lower tier pokes.

EDIT: I peaked at no.100 with 1763 points. Im gonna try to edit my team a little bit or just try again with another alt.
New Alt: Trololomomola

Just posting to say my peak of 1879 is definitive; probably it could be improved to at least 1900, but I'm kinda busy these days, and I don't plan to continue laddering with my team. This project was really awesome, and it gave me many new ideas for team building (especially those high-ranked Hail Stall teams...didn't expect Hail to be that effective). Good luck to everyone that's still in the middle of the challenge!

It's been 18 days, I plan to let this challenge run for about 5 more days 10 more days to give us an exact 4 weeks, just to give you all a timeline. I'm pretty happy with what I've seen -- a lot of people are actually being fairly creative and running some pretty cool teams. I didn't think I'd ever see a Mandibuzz in BW2, but Jobriq, our second highest scorer, was able to successfully ladder with one!

I have a few Pokemon and playstyles I'd like to inquire about; has anyone been able to successfully utilize one of the old, tried, and tested catch-all Pokemon of DPP - BW1, Scizor? I have seen very few of these, and I'm interested to see if people are simply slapping other Pokemon onto their teams!I assumed it wasn't banned because I haven't seen many, lol. My apologies, thanks ganj4lf haha.

Also, what happened to sun offense? I had high hopes for that, as Lavos's sun offense team only needs a replacement of one Pokemon (albeit, an important Pokemon) to play in this challenge, but it seems to be a non-factor, unlike last time when three sun teams qualified!

Sand offense with Hippowdon and Stoutland received a lot of love, and rightfully so. My tournament teams have included the two and I have to say that the pair is very impressive. Someone used Magnezone to trap Steel-types, which I think is pretty clever. How easy was it to run sand offense?

Last but not least, what is everyone using to counter Tornadus-T and Genesect? The best rain counter, in my opinion, is easily specially defensive Rotom-W. It's now on downright all of my teams because of its utility, and I'm pretty surprised to not see it everywhere. How did you guys handle these threats? Discuss! I want to know how this challenge has forced you to think outside the box!

Well, my team is pretty weird; I check threats rather than countering them. For Tornadus-T, I have LO Mamoswine's Ice Shard and SwSw Kingdra. Against Genesect I would usually switch in either Volcarona or Landorus or maybe sac Mew. If it ever uses a non-bug move to take out Pokemon like Landorus I can trap and kill it with Specs Gothitelle :d

I have a few Pokemon and playstyles I'd like to inquire about; has anyone been able to successfully utilize one of the old, tried, and tested catch-all Pokemon of DPP - BW1, Scizor? I have seen very few of these, and I'm interested to see if people are simply slapping other Pokemon onto their teams!

Click to expand...

I hope I'm not making some huge mistake, but wasn't Scizor banned into this challenge? It's quite obvious noone is using it - it would be breaking the rules of the challenge...

Also, what happened to sun offense? I had high hopes for that, as Lavos's sun offense team only needs a replacement of one Pokemon (albeit, an important Pokemon) to play in this challenge, but it seems to be a non-factor, unlike last time when three sun teams qualified!

Click to expand...

This is just a guess; probably many players perceive Sun based team as not that much "outsiders", hell Lavos' sun team was everywhere on the ladder some weeks ago, and it was extremely successful. At least, this was my reasoning behind picking something weatherless over a Sun team: it's much more in the spirit of the challenge.

Last but not least, what is everyone using to counter Tornadus-T and Genesect? The best rain counter, in my opinion, is easily specially defensive Rotom-W. It's now on downright all of my teams because of its utility, and I'm pretty surprised to not see it everywhere. How did you guys handle these threats? Discuss! I want to know how this challenge has forced you to think outside the box!

Click to expand...

My team handled it by not giving any free switch opportunities, and through priority / revenge killing. I had no real counter for it, but still handled the genie quite well. However, I was very interested in the Specially Defensive Rotom set; I tested it quite a bit outside this challenge, and it proved itself extremely effective not only for Tornadus but as a check to a wide range of "special" threats.